In a 6-3 rul­ing writ­ten by Chief Justice John Roberts, the Court up­held Obama­care’s in­sur­ance sub­sidies na­tion­wide, re­ject­ing a po­ten­tially dev­ast­at­ing law­suit that had aimed to ax those pay­ments to people in 34 states.

The rul­ing is a huge re­lief for Pres­id­ent Obama, whose sig­na­ture do­mest­ic achieve­ment was on the line; and for Re­pub­lic­ans, who were deeply di­vided over pos­sible “fixes” if the Court had ruled the oth­er way.

It’s also the second time in three years Roberts has helped pull Obama­care back from the brink of dis­aster; Thursday’s rul­ing came al­most ex­actly three years after Roberts cast the de­cid­ing vote to up­hold the health care law’s in­di­vidu­al man­date.

And this time, it seemed to come a lot easi­er.

Roberts’s de­cision, joined by Justice An­thony Kennedy as well as the Court’s four tra­di­tion­al lib­er­als, is a par­tic­u­larly strong, square win for the ad­min­is­tra­tion. Un­like its rul­ing on the in­di­vidu­al man­date, this time the Court didn’t reach for a middle ground. There are no signs of a last-minute change of mind. The Court ac­cep­ted pretty much all of the Obama ad­min­is­tra­tion’s front-line ar­gu­ments in de­fense of Obama­care’s sub­sidies.

“Con­gress passed the Af­ford­able Care Act to im­prove health in­sur­ance mar­kets, not to des­troy them. If at all pos­sible, we must in­ter­pret the Act in a way that is con­sist­ent with the former, and avoids the lat­ter,” Roberts wrote.

The chal­lenge in King v. Bur­well centered on a sec­tion of the Af­ford­able Care Act that refers to sub­sidies flow­ing through “an ex­change es­tab­lished by the State.” That line means sub­sidies can­not be made avail­able to people who live in states that re­lied on the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment to run their ex­changes, the chal­lengers ar­gued.

That’s too nar­row a read­ing, and it doesn’t square with the con­text of the stat­ute as a whole, Roberts wrote.

He poin­ted to many of the same pro­vi­sions the Justice De­part­ment had cited in its briefs. For ex­ample, the law dir­ects states to set up ex­changes, then says the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment should step in to set up “such ex­change” in the states that don’t do it them­selves.

“By us­ing the phrase ‘such Ex­change,’ [the law] in­structs the Sec­ret­ary to es­tab­lish and op­er­ate the same Ex­change that the State was dir­ec­ted to es­tab­lish. “¦ In oth­er words, State Ex­changes and Fed­er­al Ex­changes are equi­val­ent—they must meet the same re­quire­ments, per­form the same func­tions, and serve the same pur­poses,” Roberts wrote.

If sub­sidies wer­en’t avail­able in states that did not run their own ex­changes, premi­ums likely would have skyrock­eted in those mar­kets—even for people who didn’t get their in­sur­ance through Obama­care. Roberts’s de­cision ex­plained that out­come at length and agreed with the Justice De­part­ment’s claim that Con­gress could not have in­ten­ded to im­pose that kind of chaos.

“The stat­utory scheme com­pels us to re­ject pe­ti­tion­ers’ in­ter­pret­a­tion be­cause it would destabil­ize the in­di­vidu­al in­sur­ance mar­ket in any State with a Fed­er­al Ex­change, and likely cre­ate the very ‘death spir­als’ that Con­gress de­signed the Act to avoid,” Roberts wrote.

He even cited the dis­sent from his 2012 rul­ing on the in­di­vidu­al man­date, in which the Court’s con­ser­vat­ive justices ex­plained that “without the fed­er­al sub­sidies, … the ex­changes would not op­er­ate as Con­gress in­ten­ded and may not op­er­ate at all.”

Justice Ant­on­in Scalia, in a scath­ing dis­sent joined by Justices Samuel Alito and Clar­ence Thomas, ac­cused the ma­jor­ity of “in­ter­pret­ive jig­gery-pokery.” A strict read­ing of the words “es­tab­lished by the State” should have settled the is­sue eas­ily, Scalia ar­gued.

But Roberts, again echo­ing the law’s al­lies, said vari­ous in­tric­a­cies of the law’s core struc­ture make that read­ing too re­strict­ive.

“These pro­vi­sions sug­gest that the Act may not al­ways use the phrase ‘es­tab­lished by the State’; in its most nat­ur­al sense,” Roberts wrote. “Thus, the mean­ing of that phrase may not be as clear as it ap­pears when read out of con­text.”

"The Senate standstill over a stopgap spending bill appeared headed toward a resolution on Friday night. Senators who were holding up the measure said votes are expected later in the evening. West Virginia Democrat Joe Manchin had raised objections to the continuing resolution because it did not include a full year's extension of retired coal miners' health benefits," but Manchin "said he and other coal state Democrats agreed with Senate Democratic leaders during a caucus meeting Thursday that they would not block the continuing resolution, but rather use the shutdown threat as a way to highlight the health care and pension needs of the miners."

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UNCLEAR WHAT CAUSED CHANGE OF HEART

Giuliani Out of Running For State

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Donald Trump transition team announced Friday afternoon that top supporter Rudy Giuliani has taken himself out of the running to be in Trump's cabinet, though CNN previously reported that it was Trump who informed the former New York City mayor that he would not be receiving a slot. While the field had seemingly been narrowed last week, it appears to be wide open once again, with ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson the current favorite.

Source:

BEGINS AT MIDNIGHT ABSENT SENATE ACTION

Feds Begin Prepping for Government Shutdown

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Given the Senate's inaction on the continuing budget resolution (so far), the White House "said it has begun to work with agencies to prepare for the possibility of a large swath of the federal workforce being furloughed without pay beginning at midnight." Even if a shutdown occurs, however, "Senate procedures will allow the chamber to approve the CR with only a handful of Democrats in support by Sunday morning. Of the roughly 900,000 federal employees who were subject to furloughs in agencies’ most recent calculations, most would not be materially impacted as they do not work on weekends."

Source:

ALSO VICE-CHAIR OF TRUMP’S TRANSITION TEAM

Trump Taps Rep. McMorris Rodgers for Interior Secretary

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The House has completed it's business for 2016 by passing a spending bill which will keep the government funded through April 28. The final vote tally was 326-96. The bill's standing in the Senate is a bit tenuous at the moment, as a trio of Democratic Senators have pledged to block the bill unless coal miners get a permanent extension on retirement and health benefits. The government runs out of money on Friday night.